In its first century, psychoanalysis has had several great thinkers, but from
the author's viewpoint, only one great English-speaking wrier. Donald Winnicott.
Because style and content are so interdependent in Winnicott's writing, his
papers ae not well served by a thematic reading aimed exclusively at gleaning
"what the paper is about. " Such efforts often result in trivial aphorisms.
Winnicott, for the most part, does not use language to arrive at conclusions;
rather; he uses language to create experiences in reading that are inseparable
from the ideas he is presenting, or more accurately, the ideas he is playing
with.心理学空间Yk7nU!bK(uThe author offers a reading of Winnicott's (1945 "Primitive Emotional
Development," a work containing the seeds of vitually all the major
contributions to psychoanalysis that Winnicott would make over the course of the
succeeding twenty-six years of his life. The present author demonstates the
interdependence of the life of the ideas being developed and the life of the
writing in this seminal paper of Winnicott's. What "Primitive Emotional
Development" has to offer to a psychoanalytic reader cannot be said in any other
way (which is to say that the writing is extraordinarily resistant to
paraphrase). It has been this author's experience-which he hopes to convey to
the reader-that an awareness of the way the language is woking in Winnicott's
writings significantly enhances what can be learned from reading them.

'fW*c)e)\:yR Ne0心理学空间&im/D;wX.DRStyle and content are inseparable in writing. The better the writing, the more
this interdependence is utilized in the service of creating meaning. In recent
years, I have found that the only way I can do justice to studying and teaching
Winnicott is to read his papers aloud, line by line, as I would a poem,
exploring what the language is doing in addition to what it is saying. It is not
an overstatement to say that a great many passages from Winnicott's papers well
deserve to be called prose poems. In these passages, Winnicott's writing meets
Tom Stoppard's (1999) definition of poetry as "the simultaneous compression of
language and
expansion of meaning" (p.10).心理学空间iX([k_:W}s心理学空间d8yR]S4Q|9FIn this paper, I will focus on Winnicott's 1945 paper, "Primitive Emotional
Development," which I view as his earliest major contribution to psychoanalysis.
I will not be limiting myself to an explication of Winnicott's paper, though a
good many of the ideas developed there will be discussed. My principal interest
is in looking at this paper as a piece of non-fiction literature in which the
meeting of reader and writing generates an imaginative experience in the medium
of language. To speak of Winnicott's writing as literature is not to minimize
its value as a way of conveying ideas that have proved to be of enormous
importance to the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice; on the
contrary, my effort will be to demonstrate the ways in which the life of the
writing is critical to, and inseparable from, the life of the ideas. 1心理学空间(EaAZ` U3w.rB;_心理学空间Ea m|.VBefore looking closely at "Primitive Emotional Development," I will offer a few
observations about matters of writing that run through virtually the entirety of
Winnicott's opus. The first quality of his writing to strike the
reader is its form. Unlike the papers of any other psychoanalyst I can think of,
Winnicott's papers are brief (usually six to ten pages in length), often
containing a moment in the middle when he takes the reader aside and says, in a
single sentence, "the essential feature of my communication is this..." (Winnicott
1971 a, p.50). But the most distinctive signature of Wlnnicott's writing is the
voice. It is casual and conversational, yet always profoundly respectful of both
the reader and the subject matter under discussion. The speaking voice gives
itself permission to wander, and yet has the compactness of poetry; there is an
extraordinary intelligence to the voice that is at the same time genuinely
humble and well aware of its limitations; there is a disarming intimacy that at
times takes cover in wit and charm; the voice is playful and imaginative; but
never folksy or sentimental.心理学空间s^/e'O&HD^

6@'C7_}w};i6m0Any effort to convey a sense of the voice in Winnicott's writing must locate at
its core the quality of playfulness. The types of playfulness encountered in
Winnicott's writing have an enormous range. To name only a few: There are the
un-self-conscious feats of imaginative, compassionate understanding in his
accounts of "squiggle games" (1917b) with his child patients. There is serious
playfulness (or playful seriousness) when Winnicott is involved in an effort to
generate a form of thinking/theorizing that is adequate to the paradoxical
nature of human experience as he understands it. He takes delight in subtle word
play, such as in the repetition of a familiar phrase in slightly different forms
to refer to the patient's need to begin
and to end analysis: "I do analysis because that is what the patient needs to
have done and to have done with" (1962, p. 166).,{,X!|Et6m$L0YLa2sjCW3^0While his writing is personal, there is also a certain English reserve to
Winnicott that befits the paradoxical combination of formality and intimacy that
is a hallmark of psychoanalysis (Ogden 1989). In terms of all these matters of
form and voice, Winnicott's work holds strong resemblances to the compact,
intelligent, playful, at times charming, at times ironic, always irreducible
writing of Borges's Fictions (1944) and of Robert Frost's prose and poetry.心理学空间)b7N fi!PP kX(V!qWinnicott's inimitable voice can be heard almost immediately in "Primitive
Emotional Development" as he explains his "methodology":

心理学空间
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I shall not first give an historical survey and show the development of
my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that
way. What happens is that I gather this and that, here and there, settle
down to clinical experience, form my own theories and then, last of all,
interest myself in looking to see where I stole what. Perhaps this is as
good a method as any. [p. 145]